I forgot to link it on Wednesday, given how busy we all were at Arizona State planning the future of ScienceDebate (about which I hope we'll have more to say soon). But my latest Science Progress column, which has already prompted some critical responses, is about Obama's OIRA pick, Cass Sunstein. Without disapproving of the choice, I argue that there are definitely some serious issues that have been raised about Sunstein's stance on the role of "cost benefit analysis" and "reason" in the regulatory process:
...peering into Sunstein's writings on risk, rationality, and regulation--and other scholars' reactions to them--there's a troubling sense of what might be called, for lack of a better word, elitism. Or as Sunstein put it in his book Risk and Reason, "when ordinary people disagree with experts, it is often because ordinary people are confused." Sunstein even admits in the book that his approach is "highly technocratic." The problem is this angle could oversimplify matters, for we also have very strong reasons to be very skeptical of so-called "experts" on science and risk. Anyone who has peered into these sorts of debates closely--over, say, the herbicide atrazine or arsenic in drinking water--knows not only that the issues are exceedingly complex but also that there is a lot of ideological distortion of science by "experts" who are really ideological allies of special interests. If the choice is between such experts and the public, I'll take the public every time.
You can read the full column here.
